Chapter 3

3

Before I lost consciousness, I saw Bennett pause for a second.

But Isla started crying again, and he ultimately chose to walk away without looking back.

Lying on the operating table, scenes from our past flashed through my mind.

Once, I pricked my finger while peeling shrimp, and Bennett had kissed the wound with such tenderness.

After that, only pre-peeled seafood ever appeared on our table.

Now, we hadn't shared a meal in months.

On a snowy night two years ago, I had a craving for roasted chestnuts at 2 AM.

He went out without a word, woke up a shop owner, paid fifty times the price, and brought them back tucked inside his coat to keep them warm.

Those chestnuts had long since rotted away in the winter of the past.

When I lost our first baby, he never left my side, even fainting from exhaustion.

Now, he was the one who had kicked me into this emergency room while carrying another woman.

When did it all change?

It started when Bennett's long-lost older brother, Elias, returned home with terminal cancer.

Bennett was busy handling the funeral arrangements, and my mother-in-law begged me to let Isla and her unborn child stay with us.

Her pleas, Bennett's silence, and Isla's quiet tears wore me down.

Knowing I might never conceive again, I agreed.

I poured all my unused maternal love into that child.

I sent the best supplements and food to Isla's room like a steady stream of water.

I kept my phone on 24/7, waiting for her call.

That was until I came home early one day and found Isla in a sheer nightgown.

Bennett was kissing her stomach while massaging her legs.

Before he could explain, Isla started sobbing and tried to kneel to apologize to me.

She intentionally framed it as me being a jealous wife.

The moment she knelt, Bennett's panic turned into murderous rage toward me.

His mother came home and started calling me a "barren hen" who wanted to kill the family legacy.

Despite the freezing winter, they pushed me out of the house in thin clothes and forbade me from seeing Isla.

After that, Bennett moved in with her to "take better care of the baby."

Whenever I protested, they claimed I was just jealous of her pregnancy.

They even hired a therapist behind my back to insist I was mentally ill.

The physical pain from the anesthesia wearing off brought me back to reality.

It was a tearing, agonizing pain in my abdomen.

I opened my eyes.

This pain was real. It was clearer than anything I had felt before.

After the cold sweat passed, I calmly called my lawyer to prepare the divorce papers.

I forwarded all the intimate photos Isla had sent me to provoke me.

Those were valuable evidence now.

After sending the digital divorce agreement to Bennett, I went home to pack.

The house looked exactly as I had left it. Bennett's hesitation at the hospital had been a hallucination.

No calls, no messages.

His actions were far more honest than his words.

While packing, I found a box hidden deep in the closet.

I opened it to find hundreds of intimate photos of Bennett and Isla.

But they looked much younger in these pictures.